Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Hoarding Start-Up

theodp writes "Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold so strongly believes intellectual property is the next software that he's studying for the patent bar exam. His company, Intellectual Ventures, doesn't actually make anything - only patent attorneys roam the hallways. Myhrvold isn't the only true believer. Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using to buy up existing patents that can be rented to companies who want to produce real products."

Comments

A company built on patents only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've though about doing this, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who came up with the idea. Dammit, should've patented it when I had the chance.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[LeBlanc_Joey]

Don't worry, you still can, that is how gangs work.

This company is no more than a gang, you pay the fee, they protect you from the other IP whores. And not only is this legal, the taxpayers actually pay for it, when this bullshit floods the courts. I think some vigilante justice is in order.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[serutan]

The patent system has created a magical bridge between the world of actual achievement and the made-up world of Intellectual "Property." It's sort of like letting people go into Ultima Online and become rich and powerful, and then somehow transfer their titles and authority into the real world. The patent system clearly wasn't meant to be a platform for clever attorneys to systematically lay claim to future innovation. These people are simply taking advantage of defects in the system, making it work for them in ways it was never meant to, at the expense of everybody else. That used to be a pretty good definition of the term "con artist."

The mere fact that companies can openly perpetrate this sort of flim-flam says something about how far into la-la-land our legal system and our culture have gone. There was a time when such behavior happened behind closed doors and involved discreet payoffs to officials. Now IP pirates proudly wave their sabers and flash their gold teeth. There was a time when the media and the public would have been outraged by such brazen manipulation of the system. Now the primary response is more along the lines of, "I wish I'd thought of that."

I don't really think this sort of thing will stifle innovation -- people with great ideas will still want to see them become reality. What it will do is ensure that more of the beans end up in fewer people's piles, which is the way the economy has been going anyway for some time. In the future, if you have a clever idea you will have to look around for the right Baron to pay your tithe to, so you don't get caught poaching in the royal forest.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[Directrix1]

Thats terrorist talk there bud. On that note, fuck America (or more specifically its government). It has ceased to care about any person without a million dollar pocket book. The laws of America now exist to enslave its poor and empower its rich.

Although, the sad part is that the comman man is just as responsible as anybody else for this outcome. We have empowered them through our complacency and utter lack of regard for anything other than what is on our damn televisions every night. We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all. Especially, now that what we see on television (our defacto standard for the propogation of our culture) tells us that men have to be ignorant fools who are only interested in football, sex, gadgets, and being retarded with their friends to fit in. And women just have to buy everything including a perfect body to do the same. We are trained to be submissive idiots, questioning those who are otherwise.

Oh well, at least we still have our sweet... sweet capitalism. At least we have a choice of where we buy things. You know ma & pa shop down the street or Wal-Mart up the street for 70% less (which coincidentally enough is all you can afford now that you work there). Good thing McCarthy came along and kept us from falling into the hell hole of desperation that is communism.

And at least we still have our voice in our government. You know our solitary occasional whispering voices, compared to industries full time lobbyists. I am perfectly satisfied with all of my governmental representatives are you ;-). So when's the next civil war?

A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[Froze]

How much more broken does our system have to get before it becomes completely disfunctional.

The way I see it, These guys will basically crank random noise into the patent system until virtually every idea that trys to come into production will have a lien of some kind on it. Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy, only the mega corps will be able to produce new ideas and they will keep the pace as slow as possible to maximize there profit returns on current technology. In short THIS Bites.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[null etc.]

Marx posited that capitalism would eventually collapse in upon itself. Interestingly enough, he thought that private property would be the mechanism that inhibited, rather than secured, freedom. I think he's right, except that intellectual property will be that mechanism.

"Don't be evil"

[Carlbunn]

What about the "don't be evil" google motto? more like Don't be evil, unless it gives you a s***load of money

Back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of intellectual property law is promote innovation and investment in our societies. This 'rent-seeking' approach by major companies shows we need some serious reform in this area of law. We need to get back to basics -

Copyright is to reward authors NOT publishers and distributors.

Trademarks are to help consumers identify choice b/w products NOT assist virtual monopolies stifle competition.

Patents are to promote innovation and reward inventors NOT allow lazy rich companies to 'rent-seek' from others.

People need to remember that IP law ultimately exists to help the public. If it is not doing that it is seriously flawed.

Title should read...

[gamer4Life]

"Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Whoring Start-Up"

Re:Patent for using air to breathe

[Canordis]

We can't do it because someone already patented the Clue Hammer(TM), the Clue-by-Four(TM) and the Clue ICBM(TM)

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[java.bean]

I'm sick of people claiming this is capitalism, it's mercantilism, there is a difference. Don't assume that anything done by our current government necessarily makes it capitalist.

The IP Armageddon Commences at Last

[Catbeller]

Damn.

It's like a dream. I remember posting this more or less same comment in a PC Magazine online forum back in '98 or '99.

This is the endgame, folks. This is what Gates has had planned for years -- the real endgame. Not some iffy market monopoly over PC operatings systems and office software.

This is the whole enchilada. They want to own EVERYTHING worth owning. This is why the "Intellectual Property" meme has been pumped so hard these past few years. the real reason why the RIAA, MPAA, the SPA, and all the overseas equivalents are suing anything that moves. It's the natural outcome of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The biggest boys are pooling their resources to start the ultimate monopoly. They want to put a meter on every conceivable human idea they can beg, buy, borrow or steal. I'm not overstating how enormous their ambition is. Don't look at the distracting smiling face; keep your eyes on the magicians' hands.

I DO understand that they are talking about patents. But it's really irrelevant. They are going to force revenue to precipitate out of the ether into their hands that dwarfs anything Gates ever dreamed of. And that kind of wealth, driven by monoploy players, will be used to buy up more than merely patents.

It's why MS has been pumping the RIAA and MPAA to adopt MS proprietary codecs. It's why the X-Box REALLY exists. It's about owning the culture, or more precisely, the circulatory system of the culture. They want to own processes, patents, and eventually, every piece of ownable video, audio, and images of art. They will own the newspapers, or at least the means of disseminating the newspapers. All cable networks. They want the internet(s) under their control, if only to control the information flow so it can't affect their power.

The biggest boys are lining up for a piece of something even they can't visualize. The ultimate shape of this monster will be worldwide. It's power will be greater than any government or combination of governments.

They won't permit any real change in patent or copyright laws. They might let us have token victories on things that don't matter much, but the final shape will be dictated by them.

Here's the final outcome:

A loose confederation of very wealthy men will run a structure composed of corporations that will really, truly own every copyrighted work of man. They will own our history. They will meter it out to their advantage. Witness (NBC?) refusing to permit use of a copyrighted video of Bush making an idiot of himself on TV before the election, just because they could, no reason necessary.

And these corporations will hold copyrights and perhaps even patents, in some form, for ever-extended periods of time. Effectively for eternity. Corporations can't die. They can't go to jail. You can't arrest them. They are fictions designed to hide real men from real responsibilty for their actions.

We're going to have immortal fictions own our world. Americans say, "So what? I'll buy stock."

That's why privately owned corporations are all the rage right now. Why some of the biggest are invite-only for those they deem worthy. ICANN was bought by one of these monstrosities. Some corporations are buying back their own stock with an eye to, well, not share the wealth.

I'm only pointing out the obvious.

I'm not anti-business. I'm anti-corporation. There is a difference. I want expiration dates on IP. I want the corporate shield for individual malfeasance to be gone. I want this incestuous network of greedy buggers to hew to some kind of law that they didn't write themselves. We fought long and hard to break up the 19th century trusts that were smothering the life out of representative government; I DON'T want them back, only immortal, anational, and unkillable.

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[Waffle Iron]

The USPTO is primarily paid to examine patents, not issue them or except maintenance fees.

Yes, and there wouldn't be so many patents to examine if people didn't think that they had a good chance of getting them issued. The more that get issued, the more that get examined. Are you sure that you're not including applications that get re-examined? In my experience (I have well over a dozen patents, courtesy of my former employers), most applications ultimately get approved.

Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney?

Yes. I've been pulled into patent lawsuits.

Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?

Who the hell cares if it's fun or easy? If the patent examiner sees evidence that there's prior art on of a website, then its his civic duty to investigate further before yanking a chunk of knowledge out of the public domain for 20 years.

. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?

Because a vast numbers of bogus patents are issued but haven't yet been "discovered" by the appropriate leeches. That's one of the things that this VC new venture is going to be involved in. It doesn't matter if 95% of the patents are reasonable. One bad patent can cause orders of magnitude more economic damage to an industry than the economic worth of a typical good patent.

Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy.

Sure, there's always going to be a couple of low-level scapegoats per year to cover the collective asses of the whole system.

You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners.

Sure I am. I've been through the process many times. All it takes is ca$h, a good attorney and some technical jargon. My employers have patented some of my brilliant ideas, and some of my less-than mediocre ideas, depending mainly on how many patents they wanted to get that year. I've never noticed any correlation between the quality of the idea and the difficulty of obtaining a patent. (BTW, have you ever noticed that one of the main jobs of an attorney is to simply reformat technical documentation into double-spaced courier font for $200/hr, changing every 's' ending on a plural noun to the phrase "a plurality of". How can you read that monospaced crap all day?)

the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.

The board of appeals is an integral part of the overall flawed system.

What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs?

That would be mainly pushed by the feds headquartered in the same city as the USPTO.

I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation?

I'm not aware of any current laws requiring segregation. Back when police did enforce it, they were part of the problem, when instead they should have been protesting and resisting the laws instead of saying "I'm just doing my job here".

The USPTO does not have authority to "reject" an application (in the sense that the USPTO says "no" and the case is final) - it can only attempt to convince the attorneys that an appeal would be a waste of time, then the applicant abandons.

Any